United Joins Amazon and Target in Blocking AI Shopping Agents

United Airlines on Wednesday became the latest major company to ban unauthorized AI agents from its platforms, joining Amazon, Target, eBay, Booking.com, Resy and Yelp in a widening corporate pushback against bots that shop, book and browse on consumers' behalf.

United's new policy bars unauthorized AI agents from searching, booking, buying or managing trips. The airline cited security and regulatory risks, plus the possibility of unintended purchases. One example carries real regulatory weight: an agent checking in for a flyer could violate federal rules requiring a human to confirm their bags contain no banned items such as explosives.

The wave of restrictions follows the September release of Meta's Muse personal assistant and similar tools like Instinct, while ChatGPT and Claude have both added agentic capabilities. Companies banning the bots cite privacy and security concerns — and, increasingly, the fear that sites lose traffic when humans stop visiting directly to browse, buy or book.

So what does this change for anyone building or using an AI agent? Effectively, the open web just got a lot less open. Here's the company-by-company picture.

What are the big blockers doing?

• Amazon. GeekWire first reported in September that people using Muse to shop on Amazon saw a popup reading: "continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed." Amazon's terms don't explicitly ban all agents, but the company states that "at our sole discretion, we may limit, including by technical measures, whether and how any Agent accesses, uses, and interacts with Amazon Services."
• Booking.com. The platform bars automated assistants from making bookings or reservations without express permission, and its terms say AI-powered assistants may not access the platform for any reason without prior approval. The company says it will block anyone it suspects of using AI-powered assistants.
• eBay. The marketplace updated its user agreement to prohibit automated access without permission, specifically naming "buy-for-me agents," "LLM-driven bots" and "end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review."
• Resy. The restaurant booking platform limits which agents can access it. It supports discovery and booking through ChatGPT and Claude but can block AI activity outside those approved services, citing platform security and excessive demand on its system. Users who violate the rules risk account termination.
• Target. Target's terms prohibit AI shopping agents from accessing or gathering data from its site unless explicitly authorized. The approved list: "Target's AI Shopping Assistant, OAI, Google and Microsoft." Approved agents can sign in to accounts, build carts, place orders and initiate returns with customer permission — and Target says it can change the list or restrict access at any time.
• Yelp. The review site allows no non-human traffic without express permission. It runs a paid data-licensing program that could let an agent access its data and take certain actions through approved integrations, including one that lets ChatGPT users make reservations.

Is there a paid door in the wall?

The pattern emerging is selective, not absolute. Resy whitelists ChatGPT and Claude. Target whitelists OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. Yelp monetizes access through licensing. If you're an agent developer, the message is that permission is becoming a commercial product — negotiated deals and approved integrations, not open crawling.

The exceptions are instructive, too. Amazon's language reserves discretion rather than banning outright, which leaves room for a future partnership. Booking.com and United, by contrast, have drawn harder lines, with United grounding its stance in federal regulation rather than preference alone.

For platforms, the calculus is traffic: every booking an agent completes invisibly is a customer relationship the site never touches. For consumers, the practical upshot is that their assistant's reach now depends on which door it's knocking on — and that list of doors is shrinking by the month.